Extra Eyes On Your Life

Mounting surveillance cameras all over your house is a pretty good way to announce to the neighborhood that you're a paranoid nut case who's either trying to make some kind of statement—i.e., don't mess with me—or who has a grotesquely inflated ego. Either way, their presence—along with the implication that there might be hidden cameras on the premises, as well—pretty much guarantees that nobody will ever come into your house for any reason at all. And good luck finding a babysitter.

Now having said all that, if you aren't a paranoid nut case, there are a few good reasons to consider home security cameras—as long as they're strategically placed so as not to alarm neighbors or freak out your guests. First, there's peace of mind. Vacations can be strangely stressful for anyone prone to worrying about whether they left the iron on, or for those genuinely concerned about break-ins. Sometimes it's just comforting to pull up a picture of the old homestead and see that everything's cool—that the fish are still alive and the neighbor kids haven't spun donuts in your back yard with their ATV's. Another reason: If the systems are good enough, you can use such features as motion detection and email alerts to make sure your dog isn't sleeping on your couch when you're not around or your teenager isn't rifling through your baseball card collection. Or maybe you just have a killer view at home, and getting a live "fix" of your beach or mountain vista every few hours helps you make it through another long day at the office.

If those reasons appeal to you—or you have some other legal, not-creepy motivation for installing surveillance cams—then your time has come. Until now, consumer-grade home-security cameras—ones intended to either just record video or transmit it over the web—were expensive and unreliable, or they didn't easily mesh with most home wi-fi networks and firewalls. You usually had to reconfigure your home network, via a Byzantine process involving lots of IP addresses, to permit the cameras to send data to the host server, which you access to view the images. I've tried several of these systems over the years, and none worked well enough to be considered in any way reliable.

The Logitech Alert system is the first I've tried that doesn't, frankly, suck. It seems to solve many of the problems that bedevil other systems, and has a fluid interface that shoots live video straight to your smart phone. Their cameras range in price from $229 to $350—though you always have to start with the $299 750i Master System, the indoor model, or the $349 750e outdoor version. They install quickly and use your home electrical lines to transmit signals. So it has the reliability of a wired system without the need for running Ethernet cables all over the house. That's a huge advantage. The indoor camera sits upright in a base for placement on a shelf, or it can be suction-cupped to a window, looking either in or out. The weatherproof outdoor camera looks like a conventional security camera. It has an infrared night vision system that works well. Both cameras continuously record video on micro-SD cards, and the video can be downloaded to your PC via the wiring or by taking out the SD card.

Each camera includes a microprocessor-equipped plug that you insert into a nearby outlet, to both power the cameras and send the signal to a receiver that's plugged into an outlet near your router. An Ethernet cable connects those two, and voila—your camera views pop up on the PC-installed software. The images can also be accessed via a web browser or the iPhone/Android app. The images are bright and crisp high-resolution. You can program it to send you email alerts if the camera detects motion, and you can even program sectors of the camera's view to ignore or target—like, say, the aforementioned baseball card collection.

Thanks to this sudden surge in security-camera quality and accessibility, the hardest part about installing them in your home is now simply deciding where to put them. And that's a big problem. Cameras freak people out—and rightly so. So you may want to avoid installing them permanently in, say, your living room or dining room. And you certainly can't install them in any bedrooms, for a long list of really obvious reasons. Instead, you want to aim them somewhere where nobody will a) care, or b) likely be caught doing something private or freaky. In my case that left only a few places that were practical, in the sense that they would provide useful intel about whether everything was copasetic at home. I placed one camera in my basement, gazing benignly over a large space that doesn't usually get a lot of regular traffic, and another camera staring out the back yard, It was invisible from the street or neighbors, yet could still pick up anything amiss on most of my outdoor property. This camera has proven particularly useful this winter. It was positioned just below our bedroom window, so I found myself checking the view on my iPhone in the early morning hours to see if another onslaught of snow would keep any of us home for the day.

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